WILLIAM STUBBS
Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history
and kindred subjects
page 201

parliaments of the West, the national life of Cyprus was too much attenuated to allow it to reproduce such institutions on an unfriendly soil. The Basse Cour or Court of Bourgeois, organised under the viscounts or sheriffs of Cyprus, with jurats and other machinery of courts of law, was an organisation of tribunals of justice and local government, not a legislative constitutional organisation : its assizes are therefore a book of procedure rather than a code of laws, and, like the Assizes of the High Court, rather a record of customs than a body of statutes. These courts also, like the court of barons, may be regarded as developments towards constitutional growth, arrested and petrified at a certain stage.
But I have said more than enough upon a subject which, somewhat repulsive by itself, needs severe study before it will begin to be remunerative. The Assizes of Jerusalem will always remain a mine of feudal principles and a treasure to scientific jurists; they reflect infinite lustre on the Cypriot lawyers who, in an age of turmoil and exertion, continuous and overwhelming, found time and labour for recording them. We conceive that the lords of Ibelin must have been well acclimatised in. more ways than one ; it is certainly curious that they supplied the main historical support to the kings of Cyprus in marriage, war, and jurisprudence.
King Guy had a very short reign ; and most of the acts
that are ascribed to him I have already noted. After the
collapse of the third crusade and the three years' truce
between Richard and Saladin in 1192, he seems to have
retired to Cyprus, and to have died in April 1194; the
same year the old Emperor Isaac died in the custody 01
the Hospitallers at Merkeb. Isaac's daughter was still
wandering up and down Christendom; by the agreement
for Richard's release she was to have been handed over
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